The volunteer coordinator put on a videotape about the shelter. “Our crisis center serves two to three thousand kids every year,” said the narrator. “Without us, they have few alternatives besides the streets.” One black-and-white photo of a sober-faced kid dissolved into another: kids leaning against walls, kids lying curled up on the sidewalk. Then the happy kids, the shelter kids, in color, with smiles and graduation robes. The music swelled. “With your help,” the narrator urged, “we can make a difference in their lives. We can give them more than just food and shelter—we can give them hope.”
Had this place given me hope? I tried to remember. I remembered the food: white bread, cereal, and milk in the morning; bologna sandwiches for lunch; meat loaf and mashed potatoes out of the box for dinner. SpaghettiOs, canned vegetables, vanilla pudding. Never enough of any of it. I remembered the narrow metal bed frame, and the scratchy industrial sheets, and the bathroom I shared with six other girls; I remembered the paneled drop ceiling over my bed. I remembered the three dollars a week they gave us for spending money, and how every Friday night the counselors would open up the supply cabinet and hand out douches, one for every girl.
I remembered the douches. I didn’t know if I remembered the hope.
I frowned, trying to concentrate, but it was distracting, being back in the building again after all that time, the same building I’d dreaded and dreamed of for years after I left. That smell—cinder blocks and construction paper, the ragged, musty, wall-to-wall carpeting, the heat coming through radiators thick with cracked paint—it hit me like an old song. Right. The night I came here was windy, it was November; I was fifteen years old. I walked through those doors downstairs, went into that office I passed earlier, and talked to my very first nun, who said, “You can stay here, for now, and we’ll find you a place to live.”
There was another nun on the videotape now, saying, “Your first responsibility with these young people is to listen. First and foremost, you have to listen to them, and you have to take what they say seriously. And they may not always be telling the truth—in many cases, they won’t be; they don’t know how. But even if you don’t believe the facts of what they’re saying, you still have to believe in them, and believe that you will eventually get the facts. Believe in them, and listen to them, and keep listening, and eventually they will tell you the truth, and they will tell you how to help them, and how to teach them to help themselves.”
Listen, I wrote in my notebook, and underlined it. That’s what the first nun did for me, the night I came here. She listened to me, and she believed me.
Now I remembered the hope.
All the remembering was starting to overwhelm me; I was getting dizzy from it, from the heat in the close room, crowded with extra dimensions of time and space. It was nineteen years ago; it was today. It was in that stairwell right over there, three floors down, those girls wanted my eyeliner and I gave it to them. It was thick in here, the air swollen and static, and I knew from experience that the windows didn’t open. The Ghost of Janice Past was squirming on my lap. What are we doing here? she wanted to know. And when are we getting a smoke?
“These young people are suffering,” the nun on the tape continued. “Suffering from abuse, addiction, poverty, neglect…” I twisted in my chair, tugged the waistband of my pants, slipped my feet out of my shoes under the table and curled my toes. I could feel the bald guy grinning from two seats away. “Heightened risk of gang violence, prostitution, disease…” Oh god. Okay! We get it, all right? We’re here! We’re here, and we’re going to stop all that bad stuff from happening, so let’s quit talking about it and get to work.
Finally, the tape was over, and the volunteer coordinator switched on the lights. “Are there any questions?” she asked.
I slumped in my chair, wrung out. The grinning bald guy raised his hand and asked my question for me. “When can we start?”
I was still flustered when I got back to my apartment that night, pacing the living room with my three cats in tow, their tails crooked with curiosity. I couldn’t stop thinking about the kids I’d seen: the young girl waiting for the elevator with me, carrying her days-old baby, smaller than a loaf of bread; the two roughnecks on the corner, with their supersized jeans and their plasticized sneakers shaped like steam irons—I was three feet away from them when I realized they weren’t boys. The girl with the pink yarn in her braids, waiting downstairs in front of the intake office, singing softly to herself, that song from The Little Mermaid.
I want to be where the people are…
Ever since a few weeks ago, when I’d made up my mind to go back and volunteer, I’d been impatient to start making a difference, to start digging through that pile of needy kids and helping them, one by one, until they were all good and helped, and I could relax again, knowing they were all right. Volunteering felt like something urgent I’d left undone, something I’d been putting off for years—like the nightmares I had sometimes, where I’d left the cats neglected and unfed for a week and was racing home to see if they were still alive. Now that I’d laid eyes on these kids, I was even more anxious to get back there to the shelter, to help, to listen and believe, as the nun on the videotape had said.
I plucked a half-smoked joint out of the ashtray and lit it, swallowing a deep drag and holding it in my lungs. Such an old habit, my pot smoking—the only vestige of my drug-addled adolescence. I’d quit all my other teenage habits long ago—cocaine, ecstasy, acid, thumb sucking—but now, in my thirties, I continued to smoke pot daily. Self-medicating, I told myself, against the leftover anxieties of a tumultuous youth; after what I’d been through as a kid, I figured I was entitled to smoke as much as I wanted. Besides, everyone said I was the most productive pothead they’d ever met—I could get up in the morning, run a few miles on the treadmill, then smoke half a joint before going to my editorial job; with a few drops of Visine in my eyes, it seemed that nobody was ever the wiser.
I paced as I smoked, thinking maybe I’d call my boyfriend, Bill; he should have been home from work by then. I took another long hit off the joint, put it back in the ashtray, and dialed his apartment in Queens.
“Our hero returneth,” answered Bill, his chair squeaking in the background as he put his feet up on his desk. “So? How did it go?”
I could hear him smiling at me over the phone, could feel it all the way from Queens. Bill and I had been together for two years already, after meeting online, and I still couldn’t believe my luck in finding him, this smart, funny, nerdy, handsome guy who adored me, whom I adored. I pictured him—his warm hazel eyes behind his squared-off glasses, his broad shoulders, his long runner’s legs propped up on his desk next to a stack of comic books and Macworlds—and I wished we’d made plans for him to come over that night.
“Okay,” I said. “I mean, good. They said my application looked really good, and my recommendations were strong. So now I just have to pass the criminal-background check, and then they can place me on a unit.”
“Excellent,” he said, sounding very satisfied. “That’s great, Shmoo.”
I flopped down on the sofa, disarmed as always by Bill’s support. Even after two years, it was still hard to get used to the idea that I had a partner I could lean on and trust, someone who responded to my plans and ideas with “That’s great, Shmoo,” instead of “Well, the only problem with that is…,” like the voice inside my head, like every jerk boyfriend I’d ever had.
“I’m so proud of you,” continued Bill. “You feel good about it, right?”
“Yeah, I feel good. I feel…” Tired. I felt tired all of a sudden, like I’d run out of adrenaline, like it was three in the morning instead of nine-thirty at night. “I just…I don’t know what I’m supposed to do for these kids. I don’t know what the hell I think I’m doing. I’m not a social worker, I’m just some person off the street.”
Bill cut right through this, authoritative. “Babe, you’re more than just some person off the street. You lived there. Nobody’s go
ing to understand these kids better than you. And they’ll train you, right? I mean, once you’re placed on a unit”—he threw a little extra relish on “on a unit,” like I was going to work at Oz Maximum Security Prison, and I was buoyed for a second by his vicarious excitement—“I’m sure they’ll give you instructions, tell you how the whole system works. You’ll be—”
“I wish you were here,” I said abruptly. “I love you and I miss you and I wish you were here.”
He paused, restarted carefully. “I wish I was there too, Shmoo.”
All I had to do, I knew, was ask Bill to move in with me, and he could be there every night. I didn’t know why I was balking. He was ready to give up his lease in Queens; he was sick of schlepping his overnight bag to work every other day, of trying not to let the milk in his fridge go bad, of missing the three cats he and I had adopted together on nights he spent alone. Two years—that was more than enough time to decide whether or not you wanted to move in with somebody, especially in New York, where rent usually dictates the course of a relationship, and it’s not like I didn’t have enough room; I had more than enough. I just had to ask him, already.
“Anyway,” I demurred, “I won’t know more until I hear from this woman Nadine, she’s the head of Older Females. And it might take her a while; they’re really busy over there.”
“I’m sure they are busy,” said Bill, and yawned. The desk chair squeaked again; his feet landed back on the floor. “Listen, I’m going to eat something, maybe throw on the hockey game—you want to call me back before you go to sleep?”
The nightly before-bed phone call—another amazing feature of the Bill and Janice deal. I was crazy for not asking him to move in. I rose from the couch, and the cat on my lap made an exasperated noise. Me and my wanderlust.
“Yeah, okay,” I told him. “I love you, Shmoo.”
Nadine Daniels, head of the Older Females Unit, was as busy as predicted. Her phone was ringing as I entered her office, ten minutes early for our seven o’clock appointment, nearly knocking over a counselor on her way out, with a girl hot on my heels, pleading, “Miss Nadine! Miss Nadine! I got to talk to you about my roommate!” There were foot-high stacks of manila folders on Nadine’s desk; had she not been standing, she would have been invisible behind them.
“Don’t forget to call Charmaine!” she called after the counselor, picking up the phone. “Hello? Come in! Not you!”
It took five minutes for everything to be resolved—“No, Officer, we had no knowledge of any out-of-state warrants. We’ll transfer her belongings in the morning. Thank you. And you—I told you, we’re not moving your room again. Well, I’m sorry she disrespected your religion, but we don’t have any open beds. You’ve got to learn to get along. Now go.”
She turned her attention to me, like, You’re still here? Okay, then—welcome to air-traffic controller school. She stood five feet nine or ten, broad and imposing in her smock dress, her hands on her hips, unruffled.
“Busy night,” I observed.
“Not unusual,” she said.
She indicated the visitor’s chair, and I sat, as she did, pushing two stacks of folders to the side. She shuffled through some loose papers on her desk until she found my application, and frowned at it like she hadn’t seen it before. I doubted she had. She looked up at me, clearly dubious about this small, freckled white girl with hoop earrings and ponytail and backpack. Her eyebrows gathered, and her brown eyes locked on mine.
“So, JuhNEECE. Why do you want to volunteer with us here?”
JuhNEECE. Her lilting West Indies accent, the backward pronunciation of my name—it brought me right back to the age of fifteen, when I was living at the group home, and the meanest counselor, Mavis, would bellow at me from under her batik head wrap, JuhNEECE! That word, said in just that way, meant bad things—I’d been busted smoking a cigarette out the window of my room; I was getting raked over the coals in group therapy; I was getting double chores that week and no phone privileges. Nineteen years later, it still made me want to flinch.
I smiled instead, keeping my eyes steady on Nadine’s. “Well, as I said on the application, I’m a former resident, and I wanted to give something back—this place did so much for me when I was fifteen.”
“Really.” Nadine’s eyebrows unknotted, and she tipped her head to the side. “That’s interesting.”
“Nineteen eighty-four,” I confirmed proudly. “Two months in the minors’ wing.”
“Okay.” She nodded, holding my gaze for a long moment. She had a stare like a hypnotist, or a detective; I wanted to break down under it and confess everything. The truth is, I’d be a terrible volunteer. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here. I smoke way too much pot. I’m thirty-four, and I still act like I’m fifteen.
I laughed a little and started babbling. “Of course, I mean, a lot’s changed for me since then—I reconciled with my family, got a lot of therapy—I’m a pretty solid citizen these days. I have a nice apartment and a good job, and I guess I feel like I’m at a place in my life where I’m ready to give something back.”
She nodded again, more decisive this time. Now that she knew my angle, she could afford to be maybe 10 percent less wary of me. I could still hear the 90 percent circumspection in her voice as she continued. “So you’re familiar with our population—you know the types of clients we serve. Runaways, throwaways, addicts, kids who just got out of foster care or jail. The girls on this floor are ages eighteen through twenty—a lot of them are pregnant, or have children of their own staying with relatives, or in the system. A lot of them are emotionally disturbed. They have post-traumatic stress. They’ve been abused, they’ve been in the sex trade. Some of them are illegal immigrants. Some of them are HIV-positive. You know that, right, Juhneece?”
Her eyes stayed locked on mine, watching me for signs of fear or squeamishness. I hoped I was doing a good job of masking them. “I’m aware,” I said.
“And did they tell you the rules for volunteers? No physical contact with the residents of any kind. You’re not allowed to give them anything, including money, and you’re not allowed to accept anything from them. Try not to play favorites; treat everyone the same. Everything they tell you is confidential, unless they’re going to hurt themselves or someone else; if so, you tell staff right away. And you don’t ever try to break up a fight; you back away and call for security.”
I nodded seriously, acknowledging each item on the list as she detailed it—“Uh-huh, of course, right.”
I was in way over my head, and we both knew it. I was completely unprepared to deal with a bunch of pregnant immigrants with criminal records and post-traumatic stress. And if there was a fight, I was going to hurl myself under the nearest piece of furniture and sit there with my ass sticking out like an ostrich until help came. Her unspoken judgment of me was right; I was a poser, a well-intended cream puff looking for some street cred; I was flaky, I’d never make it. Just let me get through this interview, I told myself. I’ll worry about the rest of it later.
“All right,” she said. She leaned back in her chair, faintly smiling. “So when do you want to start. Tomorrow?”
“Oh! Wow.” Nadine’s smile broadened at my obvious surprise. I’d been dying to get started, but now I felt unprepared somehow, like I needed to shop for supplies, or pack a suitcase, or get a degree in social work or something. “Well, I have some commitments after work tomorrow, but—”
“Uh-huh.” There was a knock on the door, and she looked up, ready to be done with me and move on. “Just a minute!”
“But I could start next Wednesday. I could come in after work, around five-thirty? Would that be good?”
The knocking continued. “Miss Nadine!” She picked up her pen, hovering over her calendar, and looked at me with a devilish grin, like, Last chance to change your mind. I looked back at her, earnest and unblinking.
“Wednesday at five-thirty,” she said, writing it down. “Juhneece.”
Nadine rose from b
ehind her desk, and I rose as well, my backpack sliding awkwardly off my lap onto the floor. I stooped to get it, laughing at myself, saying “Whoops!” like an idiot. I managed to collect myself and shook her outstretched hand.
“You know,” she said, almost incredulous, as she put her hand on my shoulder to steer me out. “I think you might do all right here.”
My first shift: an abject failure.
I showed up early and eager and knocked on Nadine’s door, ready to present myself for service, but she wasn’t there. So I turned to check in at the counselors’ office down the hall, where I interrupted a heated discussion between two girls and a young female counselor regarding whose fake hair belonged to whom.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m the new volunteer.”
The counselor did not address me; the two girls ignored me as well. Another young female counselor was on the phone; a third counselor, a twenty-something guy with glasses and a shaved head, glanced up from his paperwork and looked at me. “Uh, okay, why don’t you hang out in the lounge for now, and see if anybody needs anything.”
He turned back to his paperwork, and I backed out of the office, obviously in the way. There was nobody in the lounge when I entered, just a large-screen TV playing a rerun of Full House on mute. I lay my coat on a grimy, beat-up sofa and sat down.
Now what.
Nothing, for a while, and then two girls came down the hallway speaking Spanish to each other. The only words I could make out from my undergraduate days were ahora and también. Now and also. “Veinte dólares,” said one. I lingered by the lounge entrance and smiled in their direction as they passed. I didn’t know how to say, So, ladies, is there anything I can help you with? in Spanish. Any outstanding emotional issues you’d like to discuss with a total stranger? They giggled, pushed open the door to the stairwell, and were gone. So much for helping them.
Have You Found Her Page 2